Uri Avnery in The Progressive: The truth is that the atrocities are a direct result of the war plan, clear evidence of what is called 'moral insanity' ...
Hamas is deeply rooted in the population -- not only as a resistance movement... but also as a political and religious body that provides social, educational and medical services. From the point of view of the population, the Hamas fighters are not a foreign body, but the sons of every family in the Strip and the other Palestinian regions. They do not 'hide behind the population,' the population views them as their only defenders...
He who gives the order for such a war with such methods in a densely populated area knows that it will cause dreadful slaughter of civilians... A top priority of the planners was the need to minimize casualties among the soldiers... by the total destruction of everything in their path... The planners thought they could stop the world from seeing these images by forcibly preventing press coverage... But the cameras are inside the strip, in the middle of hell, and cannot be controlled...
Not only is Israel unable to win the war, Hamas cannot lose it... What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints.
The United Nations Human Rights Council... adopted a resolution in which it strongly condemned the ongoing Israeli military operation in Gaza, which had resulted in massive violations of human rights of the Palestinian people, and demanded the occupying power, Israel, to immediately withdraw its military forces from Gaza.
Chris Hedges, in Truthdig: The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use the lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase of the decades-long campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians... 'It seems,' the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote recently, 'that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system. This ideology has allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and present to dehumanize the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide].'
